


Acculturation

by Assimbya



Series: Compromise [6]
Category: Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:01:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28836732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/pseuds/Assimbya
Summary: AU. Dracula and his wives try to fix their mistakes. Sequel toAdjust.
Relationships: Brides of Dracula/Mina Harker, Dracula/Brides of Dracula, Dracula/Jonathan Harker, Dracula/Mina Harker
Series: Compromise [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/56784
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	Acculturation

**Author's Note:**

> Usual warnings for this series - nonconsensual power dynamics, vampire violence, coercive sexual interactions. 
> 
> Please do not ask me about the mechanics of how often these vampires need to feed and how they manage not to totally obliterate the local population, because trying to figure it out has been giving me a headache.
> 
> Thank you so much for sticking with the epically slow progress of this series.

Ecaterina liked Jonathan. She had from the first, and indeed thought of him still as she had seen him at the beginning, when he was an unfamiliar young man with a secondhand travel case standing upon the castle’s threshold. She had watched him trying to remain courteous while responding to her lord’s baffling attempts at conversation, and she had been charmed with his decorousness, his cautious care.

She had resented him, of course, for what he represented - he was a harbinger of her lord’s departure, his presence heralding another one of those journeys which would leave her alone with her sisters. The last time her lord had done this, she had been hard-pressed to keep Ileana from murdering so many of the peasant folk that she brought down a mob upon them with pitchforks and crucifixes. 

That journey of their lord’s had given them their beloved Adriana, and for that she was of course grateful, but it did not mean she hated those times without him any less. For the first few nights it might feel like freedom, but she would soon find panic stirring in her blood, and a desperate longing for the harsh surety of his presence. She didn’t want to do it again, especially not with the added responsibility of caring for Adriana, who, seemed still fragile a century into her undeath.

For those reasons she had tried at Jonathan’s death, back then. But there had never been malice there, not from her.

The liking had continued through his return, months later, driven by the wolves. As he collapsed in that same threshold where once he had stood unknowing, and as her lord smiled in the satisfaction of a plan gone right, Ileana had hissed in Ecaterina’s ear, “He will never last.” Ecaterina didn’t disagree; she tried not to get attached to her lord’s new consorts before they had proven themselves, and especially not to the men. But there was regret to her agreement, wistfulness. It would be nice, she thought, to have someone else with manners around the castle, someone who could learn his place and not demand more attention than was his due.

All seemed promising, for the first stretch of his captivity and changing. He was reserved in his anguish, so Ecaterina could not see his progression so clearly as she had read the arc of Ileana’s fiery resistance and smoldering resignation, or Adria’s steady adjustment, like an anchoress shaping herself to the walls of her cell. But there were no major upheavals, no serious cause for concern.

And then Mina arrived, and Jonathan’s progress fell apart.

His focus divided, and with it his loyalty. He was distracted when she saw him, internally preoccupied. She couldn’t tell how much of the fault was in Jonathan himself, and how much was her lord’s excitement at having the pair of them getting the better of his judgment. He delighted in being able to torment them together, like a child with a new toy, even when it was clear that such sessions alienated them both not only from each other but from him.

She held her tongue and waited for him to ask her opinion. 

He did, eventually, after some crisis during which Jonathan and Mina both tried at some form of joint rebellion. When they were both separated and locked up awaiting punishment, he came to Ecaterina.

She was sewing when he found her, mending a rip in a dress she thought might do for Adria, who was tall enough that she often could not wear the same clothes that the rest of them shared. But she could feel the coiled tension in him when he sat down in the chair beside her, and so she put aside her work and knelt, resting her head against his knee as she knew he liked. It worked; there, at once, were his fingers in her hair, steady, soothing both of them. For a few minutes they stayed like this, and then he lifted her chin, and she knew he wanted to see her eyes as they talked.

He said, as she had somewhere knew he would, “I may need to kill Jonathan.”

She said nothing; she knew he could see her disappointment; he also knew, as she did, that she would be able to bear her disappointment, if matters came to that.

“Tell me how you see it,” he ordered.

She would not be anything but honest with him. “I see that Jonathan can be salvaged, but that may be only be my own hope.”

“Your hope is valuable,” her lord told her, “I too share it.”

She spoke words he knew, and felt herself compelled to speak them. “I have felt it, whenever one of us dies. And, while I have borne such wounds before, when I imagine now, I cannot think how I would survive it again.”

There was tenderness in his voice. “You would survive it as we always survive such losses. That is one of the things that our undeath means - that we can bear suffering upon suffering and not die. It is not a decision I contemplate lightly. The bonds that we all share are a source of ecstasy and fulfillment, but they mean also that the loss of one is an injury to us all.”

“I don’t know how it is that you can do it,” she told him, but a moment after she spoke she realized that she did know. She remembered his inward gaze as he cut himself, as he opened up a vein upon his wrist or chest or throat for her or her sisters and brothers to drink from. It was that, only magnified a hundredfold. The discipline that allowed him to harm himself.

Ecaterina felt tears in her eyes. He had been watching her face and thoughts, silent. “Yes,” he said, “that’s right.” 

She took the hand with which he had been stroking her hair, kissed it, pressed it between her palms. She had been with him for centuries. She didn’t need to speak aloud.

He grasped her hand and pulled her up to sit beside him. “Strategize with me,” he ordered her, “what can we do to keep them both alive, here, within the place that has been built for them?”

The answer to this had always been clear to her, but he had not asked her before. She might needle him with that fact another time, when his patience was not already so thin. For now she just told him, “They have to be separated from each other. Together, they stymie each other’s progress, each remind the other of their past humanity. Each of us has come into this new life alone, welcomed by our lord and sisters, taught the new mode of existence by each other’s example. Kept together, it is as if Jonathan and Mina are both constantly confronted with their own reflection and shamed by it. It was wise to keep Ileana and Mina together so much, and I know she has been working hard with her, but in Jonathan’s presence she backslides. I think it is even worse for him.”

“This would divide my attention,” he said, “further than it already is. I have plans to lay, still. I have not given up on England. And I do not wish to neglect any of you.”

“We can help,” she told him, “all of us, as fits our capabilities. As you have always maintained. Didn’t you say you wanted Jonathan to take over your business affairs?”

“I did. For which he must maintain more of his human instincts; I cannot leave him with you again, though I know you did so well before. He will see only me, then. Yes. The isolation broke him quickly when first he came to us. I can work with that.” He rested his hand on Ecaterina’s knee. “I will need to you take the lead with Mina. Ileana can help, but she doesn’t have enough control yet.”

The implied praise of his trust in her still thrilled her, even after all these years. “Of course.”

“She’s very close to the edge; I want you to push her over.”

Ecaterina felt a jolt like lightning in her belly; she traced the feeling back. Desire, surely, for proud Mina humbled, Mina who had been raised with the education and the choices that she and her sisters had never been afforded, who had thought herself above them and all of them creatures to be pitied as she might have pitied women in an Ottoman harem. At once, there was the flicker of horror at what her lord was doing and what he had done to all of them, a horror which could never be effaced no matter how long or how fully she believed in it. And there, also, were the beginnings of love, for Ecaterina always loved her sisters, the beloved companions of her heart, the solace of her immortality. That love had begun with Mina’s rebirth into undeath, but it would deepen and spread as she continued to change into her final form, as it became safer for her to love without the fear of loss.

(Her lord, she knew had no such safeguard: he had to love them to change them, love them with his violent, possessing love which demanded the consumption of its object. He took the risk of loving upon himself, for the sake of their household. It was one of the many things she loved him for.)

“Tell me what you need me to do,” she said.

-

When, hours later, Mina emerged from her lord’s punishment, she had dressed herself up - hair piled atop her head, a string of pearls which Ecaterina knew to her own around her throat. To Ecaterina’s eyes, she looked like a girl dressed up in her big sister’s finery. The human Mina that Ecaterina had heard both Jonathan and her lord describe had cared little for ornament, had owned barely any jewelry at all. She was playing at something - some image that she imagined to be desirable, or seductive. It charmed Ecaterina and, somewhere, saddened her.

She watched Mina sitting opposite to her, watched as Mina seemed to become lost in the texture of Adria’s dark hair to the point that she barely heard Ecaterina and Ileana’s conversation. In a flash, Ecaterina found herself remembering the early nights of her own undeath, when it was just her and her lord alone in the vastness of the castle, the way she would sit for hours at the window listening to the wolves and owls and bats, staring at the moon’s brightness. How new and fresh and sharp everything became. The closeness between them felt so strong, and Ecaterina wanted more than anything for all their family to be in unity, to become a pack of wolves or a flock of bats or a cloud of mist, to hold to each of them so tight and deep that no one could ever separate them. 

But this was not what had been asked of her. And so she watched, with the calm resolve she had learned from him, admired the contrast of Mina’s darker skin tone against Adria’s fairer one. Ileana went to the join them and twined herself around Mina like a vine. Ecaterina was giving her conversation with Ileana only half of her attention.

“You should learn Romanian,” she told Mina, “it’s not fair, that we must always work to speak in your language, but you cannot even try to speak in ours.”

(Romanian was not, in fact, Ecaterina’s own language, but Mina didn’t need to know that yet. She remembered how her lord had taught it to her, the game they made of it with lashes to compensate for mistakes. How terrified and excited she had been.)

“I would like that,” Mina answered, shyly, not even looking directly at Ecaterina as she said it. Ileana kissed her shoulder, and Ecaterina saw her gasp.

That was when he arrived. He stood in the doorway, watching them, and Ecaterina thought she was the only one who noticed the weariness and coiled tension in the set of his shoulders. Mina and Jonathan could not recognize this, she thought, how great a toll their rebellion placed on him. Even Ileana and Adriana, she thought, were too caught up in the solipsism of their own joys and sufferings to understand. She was glad when he came to sit with her.

“Keep going,” he told the trio opposite them. Vampires could not blush, but Ecaterina felt sure that Mina would have if she could. Her fingers stumbled over the lacings on Adria’s gown. Ecaterina rested her head on her lord’s chest and felt her own arousal as a distant, quiet thing. Ileana was showing off, she thought, trying to prove how well she had done with the time that their lord had left Mina under her care. Mina was doing better than before, but was caught in some thread of thought, was not fully present in her actions. 

It was not her place to give critique. She bided her time.

-

He had other matters to attend to, he said later, and left the four of them in the wing of the castle that was their own, that Ecaterina thought of in her own mind as the terem. He kissed each of them before he left, and Mina last. There was a hint of panic in her face as he shut the door, but only a hint. Ecaterina turned to her.

“First thing,” she said, “you’ll give me back my pearls.”

She had succeeded in surprising Mina; her hands rushed to the clasp of the necklace. “Pardon me,” she said, “I didn’t - “

“Of course not,” Ecaterina said, holding out her hand for them, “how could you? But it’s time you began learning the way things work here.”

Mina dropped the pearls into Ecaterina’s palm. She closed her fingers around them.

“I am the first among us and you, at this time, are the last. We’ve all been understanding with you; you’ve been adjusting. But it’s time now. You’re one of us now. You must act as we do.”

She hadn’t warned Ileana or Adriana that she planned to give this speech, and she could feel anxiety from each of them. Their bonds with one another were more wordless than each of theirs with their lord, more channels of feeling than of thought, but she tried to offer them reassurance and love.

“I’m sorry,” Mina said, “I’ve never been much at ease with other women, never had many friends, only…” She swallowed, her voice trailing off. “I thought somehow that the pearls might make it easier, might make it feel like I didn’t have to be myself, when I did these things.”

Ileana laughed, sharply. Ecaterina ignored her. She stepped into the space in front of Mina and kissed her forehead. “Sweet sister. Don’t pretend, not with him, not with any of us.”

Tears on Mina’s cheeks. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how to stop fighting.”

“It’s difficult, the transformation. We all know. It hurts now, and it will keep hurting. But when you let yourself feel it, you will never be alone again.”

She saw Mina bite her lip, almost something back and then decide to say it. “Jonathan told me not to trust you.”

Ecaterina slapped her, let the sudden sharpness of it startle Mina. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare place him above any of us. You two are not different from the rest of us, you are not special. I don’t want to hear his name from you unless our lord speaks to you of him specifically.”

She saw something hard and bright in Mina’s gaze, the flare of whatever animal force was yet nascent in her. Good. If Mina challenged her authority then she could handle that as she knew how. Violence was in their natures; none of them were human anymore.

-

He left them largely alone together, as they had planned, as he had told Ecaterina that he would. A few nights into this, he brought them a victim - woman, middle-thirties, with a kind face, eyes glassy with his hypnosis. He told them to make her last. This, everyone other than Mina knew, meant keeping her alive, for they would not be getting another one soon.

She told Adria to air out the room with the lock on the outside of the door, and sent Ileana down for fresh water. She herself guided the woman to sit down and began to untie the kerchief around her throat. She woman complied, hazily. “We can each take a little tonight,” she told Mina, “but not too much; you’re not used to this, you’ll have to keep control of yourself. After that only one of us should feed a night; I don’t know how long he wants us to make her last.”

Mina was very still, and said nothing. Ileana came back with the water. “Give some to her,” Ecaterina told Mina.

There was only a moment of hesitation before Mina poured the water into a cup and crouched down at the woman’s side. She was just beginning to stir from the hypnosis, and drew back. Mina cringed. Ecaterina wished that she hadn’t sent away Adria, who was the best of them at hypnosis, but stroked the woman’s hair, and did what she could. The woman eased slightly, and swallowed the water.

“Killing her now would be more merciful,” Mina said softly.

It was probably just as well that Mina didn’t yet know Romanian, and that this woman, half-drugged with hypnosis as she was, likely didn’t know English. “Where does mercy come into it?” Ileana asked, “You tell me about mercy when you’ve been starving in agony for weeks because he’s gotten lost in his studies and forgotten to feed you. Human blood replenishes itself; it’s a great wonder. Of course I’d prefer to have her all now too, but we can’t.”

Ecaterina didn’t want to wait any longer; she took the cup of water from Mina’s hand and set it down, drew the woman into her arms and bit her. The pain shattered the thin veil of the hypnosis, and she screamed. The blood was warm and good, and Ecaterina had to force herself to stop after only a few mouthfuls. When she took her teeth away the woman struggled in her grip, shouted. She handed her to Ileana.

“We have to do this sometimes,” Ecaterina told Mina, “or we would kill too many to sustain the village population. We won’t be cruel to her.”

“Taking her blood a little bit each night is cruel,” Mina protested, “he did it to me, over and over, as we travelled here. It was horrific.”

Ecaterina noticed that she felt only tenderness for Mina, not irritation; she found herself remembering Ileana, early on, caught in the same web of her own complicity. 

“I know, dear,” she said gently, “but she’s not like you. She’s not going to have to remember it. Now, come - I don’t know why Adria isn’t back yet, but you can take your turn, and then get her settled in her room. It will be a good opportunity for you to practice your Romanian.”

Mina did as she was told. Ecaterina felt a twinge of satisfaction - she had been right. She was going to keep both of them alive.


End file.
